Silhouette

I might not have much time to continue here in the next few days so I'll start by thanking you for the interesting and thoughtful discussion.

I do agree with some of your important points. It is a problem that copyright works by creating an artificial monopoly without sufficient control on how that monopoly is then used. It is a problem if there's insufficient incentive for creators to make works permanently available to those who want them. As I said earlier I do think some reform is needed in this area.

I don't think that's sufficient today to support your central argument that works should only be available on a permanent basis. The two financial models we've been discussing are a trade off between having access to specific works indefinitely (the sale model) and having access to many more works but only for a limited period of time (the library model). Either way the scope is limited and that makes the price viable. I don't think the prices for streaming services that operated on the alternative basis you're proposing would stay the same. I think they would go way up and that could reduce a lot of people's ability to access the long tail of works that they wouldn't want to spend the full price to buy permanently.

I also want to point out that your views here appear to be based on the US implementation of copyright. Some aspects of copyright in the US are at least questionable under the related international treaties already but pragmatically the US is powerful enough economically that its big companies can get away with a lot for now. Likewise the US itself can get away with having very generic fair use exceptions in its laws. That could change - with very significant economic effects - if the US attempted the kind of legal shift you're proposing without engaging strong international support first. And that would obviously require convincing everyone that the economics would continue to work. In any case some of your arguments about backups and physical media wouldn't apply in most of the world (or even in the US given the DMCA - but of course DRM and the legal protection it's been given around the world is a whole controversy in itself because it potentially makes a lot of the legitimate criticisms of copyright even worse).

IMHO your last point is the place we should look first. The problem is that the market isn't really competitive when copyright holders can license the works exclusively. This leads to problems like works only being available on a single streaming service or broadcast on a single TV channel. Sometimes different seasons of the same show or successive films from the same series end up on different services or channels. Sometimes works get yanked from a streaming service's library with relatively little notice when their deal runs out. If we changed the rules so that works being offered commercially to one distributor also had to be offered to other distributors with similar terms and pricing and within a relatively short time then I think that alone would restore a lot of healthy competition in the market and solve some of the significant problems with how the current distribution models are working. And importantly it is relatively practical to explore options in this area compared to trying to radically restructure the entire copyright model globally.

There's a lot more that we could discuss here. For example we haven't even touched on creative works like software that tend to be updated over time and the different models for supporting that. We haven't considered how to deal with work of potentially high value but a short useful lifetime like news reporting and investigative journalism either. It's a huge area - and that's a big part of why I think throwing out the whole principle of limited licences in favour of allowing only permanent sales is probably not the right way to go here. But the problems are real and I do agree with you that the system could be significantly better than it is today.

I don't know. But given that Beyoncé formed her own management company about 15 years ago I'm not sure the answer was going to make the point you were intending anyway.

This is demonstrably untrue. Today we have more access to far more works in more media on more subjects both entertainment and educational than ever in the history of the world. And almost all of them were ultimately built on the back of copyright and the economic models it supports.

It's true that copyright makes a few people very rich. Some of those people certainly are artists. The "almost nothing" that Beyoncé has made from her music career reportedly paid for the private jet she bought Jay-Z as a gift a few years ago for example. Taylor Swift is reportedly now a multibillionaire. There's a reasonable argument that big name musicians have often worked on very successful concert tours and so not all of their income has necessarily required copyright. That argument doesn't really work when you look at bestselling authors or A-list TV and movie stars whose copyright-backed residuals and royalties keep them very well funded though.

Of course many of the other parties who make a lot of money from copyright are intermediaries like book publishers and record labels. The value of their contributions is increasingly questionable in the modern world and the measures they have taken to protect their revenue streams have sometimes been similarly questionable. I won't be sympathetic if copyright reforms render their business models obsolete and shift power back into the hands of the people doing the actual creative work with those providing services like distribution and advertising becoming subservient rather than the other way around as has often been the case historically.

Nobody has a right to have an economic value for what they sell.

This is true. (It's true in every other industry as well.)

But the opposite side of that coin is that if you want people to spend the considerable amounts of time and money required to create new works that are actually any good then you need to have some viable model for compensating them that makes it worthwhile for them to do that. Whatever else you can say for it - copyright has been far more effective than any other model ever tried at the scale of human society in achieving that.

Does it though? The incremental revenue from customers renting something and then renting it again is going to be very small. The "loss" from providing them with a permanent copy instead would be a rounding error, especially for a product with no marginal cost.

It destroys the library model used by Spotify, Netflix, and all the other similar services for one example. Those are clearly not working on the same basis as selling permanent copies of everything you might want to listen to or watch. They clearly do make a lot of revenue from subscribers enjoying the long tail of music and programmes and often that includes repeats. Many more people enjoy many more works that aren't the big headliners under this model. People can also try something they might enjoy without committing to the cost of buying it and therefore don't have to feel bad if it's not for them and they give up after a few minutes. And yet obviously the subscribers individually spend far less in many cases than it would cost them to buy permanent copies of everything they'd listened to and watched. Given the popularity and financial success of the streaming services this is evidently an alternative model that works for both sides. So I would challenge your claim that the loss from always providing permanent copies is insignificant.

I don't really buy the other argument you're making either. With digital works there isn't much reason for a "second hand" market where copies would be significantly cheaper than a "new" copy direct from the supplier. When people used to trade used works on physical media there was a degree of degradation in those media that justified a price reduction. Why would someone who had bought a copy of the latest summer blockbuster sell it for 30% of its original purchase price if it's a flawless digital reproduction identical to a new one? Naturally this shifts the dynamics in the market and the price of buying a true permanent copy that can legally be sold on afterwards would tend to increase because of this effect. Meanwhile the library services I mentioned above work on almost the opposite basis and it tends to push the price per work accessed down because the subscribers aren't effectively subsidising other people who are enjoying identical works to themselves but without paying the original source anything to access those works.

I think there is demonstrably room enough in a world of billions of people with access to orders of magnitude more content than any of us could experience even once in our lifetimes for multiple economic models. What matters is that people get to create useful works and other people get to enjoy those works and the financial arrangements make this worthwhile for everyone. There are certainly flaws in the current copyright model that is established in most of the world. There are rights that I think people who have bought (or believe they have bought) permanent copies of works should enjoy with the force of law behind them if necessary.

I don't have a great answer yet to the problem of rights holders not wanting to make anything available permanently at all so that everyone is locked into some form of temporary arrangement. Clearly market forces haven't always sorted that one out effectively and some sort of adjustment is warranted. But I'm also wary of relying on some form of government regulation that distorts the market and potentially excludes arrangements that everyone actually involved might find worthwhile. Maybe you could somehow require that once any work has more than a certain number of licensed copies in circulation or has been available to a certain number of people from authorised sources for a certain (relatively small) number of years then it must also be available for sale as a permanent licence - regardless of any other continuing and still legitimate ways to access it from authorised sources - but with some recognition that a fair price to buy a permanent copy that comes with all the associated rights today might be significantly higher than what these things used to cost in the days when physical media were required.

No renting of copyrighted works for money. The customer owns a copy or GTFO.

That immediately destroys several useful and viable business models that actually work in that they provide more access to more creative work to more people while the rights holders also make a return.

I am in favour of copyright reform but not of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Making all this (for example) work nicely together can be tricky: Vite, ESLint, Prettier, Typescript and React, especially if it's full stack with SSR.

Although about 98%* of that is because ESLint keeps making breaking changes and getting everything else to work compatibly with ESLint requires 27,573* additional dependencies.

Things I work on have been moving over to Biome recently (mostly these are Vue projects rather than React these days) for formatting and linting and it's so much simpler and avoids all the "What ESLint-related package broke our build process this week?" discussions entirely.

*Some numbers here may be made up. Or they might not.

This is global trade and comparative advantage at work. If someone outside the country can produce an equivalent product to what a local producer would make, they can supply it to our market more efficiently than our local producers, and there are no moral qualms (for example people working under conditions that are unacceptable by our standards) then everyone benefits from the import arrangement except for the local producers who can't compete.

From an economic perspective the local producer then needs to become more efficient and/or produce a better product to remain competitive. Alternatively they can do something else that is a more productive use of their time and skills. Again this is just a free market at work. The economic principle is no different if another local producer opened down the road from the existing local producer and they were the ones making the same product cheaper or a better product for the same price.

Protectionism arguably has a place. For vital interests like national defence there is an argument for making certain things locally so you have complete control because of the security implications and because the normal rules of international trade and diplomacy might not be working properly at the time when you need those products. But even in fields like defence and strategic infrastructure and perhaps the most obvious example of simply putting enough food on everyone's plate to survive there are few if any Western nations that don't rely significantly on international trade.

There is an example I always remember from the Brexit debates here in the UK. The Remain campaigners talked a lot about the advantages of being in the EU's Single Market and Customs Union. (These are the two big economic arrangements in the EU that allow member states to trade freely among themselves without tariffs or non-tariff barriers.) And certainly for intra-EU trade they do offer many economic advantages.

However the cost of being under the protectionist umbrella was much less discussed - surprisingly even by Leave campaigners. All member states are required to apply the common EU-based tariffs to anything coming into their country from outside the union. So when the EU introduced extremely high tariffs to protect the fruit growers in its Mediterranean member states that was good for those growers. But we don't exactly grow a lot of citrus fruit in the UK with our milder northern European climate. We also already had some established trade routes with north African nations that could supply similar products at potentially lower cost and would have liked to increase that trade with us - a mutual benefit for both their suppliers and our consumers that would have cost neither of us anything directly. The EU tariffs made that financially unviable and therefore benefitted some of the southern member states but at the expense of both consumers in the UK (also an EU member state at the time!) and the more efficient suppliers from Africa.

Protectionism is inherently inefficient economically. Sometimes it might be appropriate for other reasons but in purely financial terms it's almost always a negative effect.

Maybe it's triggering ad blockers? I have JS enabled and I see a few elements but it's obviously broken here too.

In any case it's not a great look if they want to encourage adoption of their tools!

I agree that one doesn't preclude the other. But the sky high valuations we've been seeing for the AI industry recently can only be justified if they bring about a fundamental change in our society and those companies continue to bring in the lion's share of the resulting profits. I don't see why everyone else in our society - particularly other large businesses with lots of money to invest - is going to play a game by the AI companies' rules once they can take their ball and go home and still have most of the fun without paying much for it by comparison.

It might have been regulatory capture - though I have seen no specific evidence of that myself. It might simply have been the old story about a road and good intentions. At this point it doesn't really matter how it happened - it would be better if the situation were fixed in any case.

This is why I'm bearish on Anthropic, OpenAI, and friends. I am not confident that we will continue to see the same pace of improvement in frontier model capabilities as we have seen over the past year or two - not using similar mathematics at least. But I think that getting results that are close enough to the same standard to be a realistic substitute but in a model small enough to run locally may well happen quite quickly. And if it does - where is the moat to defend these AI organisations with their astronomical budgets when they're already starting to price more realistically and that's already killing a lot of the hype they've enjoyed until very recently? They have an accidental moat because they bought up the global supply chain for storage but that surely isn't going to last once the data centres to hold that storage are becoming liabilities.

Indeed. It's a triumph of consumer protection laws failing to protect consumers. Merchants here have to set their prices a bit higher to compensate for the fees and you still have to pay those higher prices as a customer even if you're using a more efficient payment method. I will never understand why the law wasn't set the other way - requiring explicit disclosure of payment fees to end customers and prohibiting payment services from incorporating these kinds of anticompetitive terms in merchant agreements - so that everyone could make an informed choice and market pressures would push the transaction overheads down.

That would seem like a logical solution. So wouldn't it be convenient for the expensive payment methods if legalities prevented merchants from charging higher fees to customers using them?

The problem is that the medium term prospects are irrelevant to all the businesses that won't be around long enough to enjoy them.

Smaller businesses in particular - not so long past the COVID disruption and already facing significant challenges in areas like logistics and energy supply costs - will not necessarily have the reserves that older and larger businesses often do to withstand another multi-year price shock.

If you apply those practice, then quickly you find yourself using the agent as merely a writing boost.

I don't know what that means but I have seen no evidence so far that if you don't apply those practices then your code will be anything other than unmanageable spaghetti if you leave AI to maintain it for long.

Coding has never been the bottleneck for good developers. Part of the reason for that is that good developers know how to isolate different aspects of a system and so keep each individual aspect relatively simple and self-contained. Another part is that good developers were already standardising and automating a lot of the grunt work. These traits are also advantageous for keeping generative AI on the right track and keeping its proposed changes manageable.

Your version sounds like it's potentially useful. The thing that winds me up is when the online chat that used to be talking with real support people gets quietly replaced with some LLM-backed noise generator and there's no way to contact real support people any more (possibly because 95% of them were laid off).

If there is one good thing that the generative AI tools have shown beyond any doubt it's that the classic "good programming" practices are still useful and effective. Self-documenting code. Modular design. Clearly defined architecture. Incremental development. Coding standards. Automated tests. Automated everything.

If there's a second thing the generative AI tools have shown beyond any doubt it's that many of the more modern (relatively speaking) "best practices" that have always been over-hyped and questionably-evidenced really do tend to produce worse results. LLMs take these methods to their logical conclusions and show us the end result much sooner. You can't just iterate your way to a solution when you don't even know what problem you're trying to solve. If you don't have a clear spec then you don't know what a correct product looks like. You need to invest time in reviewing code properly. If you don't keep the big picture in mind then the big picture becomes a mess.

Maybe one day the LLMs will leave me out of a job but at least I'll feel validated first!

The big difference IME is that first-tier support at decent companies at least had the grace to recognise when they couldn't help and needed to escalate. I can count the number of times I've seen an AI bot automatically escalate when it was unable to find the solution on zero hands.

I'm not sure FAANG does look good on a CV any more. The skill set to be effective in those environments is quite specialised and crucially it's very different to what you need in a lot of other software development organisations. There appeared to be a happy cycle for a while where very well paid devs working in one of the few FAANG or FAANG-adjacent companies could jump to one of the others because they were "in the club" and had experience of working at a truly global scale that most software never needs. Those days seem to be over with the mass layoffs and hiring limits. And if you're not working at that scale - and outside that small world almost nobody actually is - those skills aren't always very transferrable and other types of experience often have more value.

I am also increasingly worried by the potential for violence here. This is a social experiment that is harming the daily lives of millions of people in very obvious ways already. The environmental costs for the data centres are not insignificant. The economic damage from allowing AI to have so much funny money when it doesn't make much real money to justify it could be disastrous on a generational scale. Governments aren't making any serious attempt to regulate and if anything are drinking the Kool-Aid. We might be on a path that literally collapses the established Western capitalist order within a generation but historically societal change of that scale usually has a body count and I have no idea what comes afterwards.

AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague.

Even Stripe - once legendary for the quality of its support - has apparently given up now. I had to deal with it recently over a case where the merchant was seeing an unexpected change in the way it was collecting payments and the AI bot was worse than useless - it actively suggested incorrect explanations and resulted in several days of trying to change the wrong things while the problem persisted.

For my own businesses we give this issue a heavy weight when choosing which services to use. We have even seriously considered moving existing integrations to different services over this one issue recently. If we're integrating with a service then we want to know there's a real person who can actually help if we have questions or anything goes wrong. Failing to provide that because it's cheaper to push everyone through the AI bot is a statement of intent about how much you value your customers.

It's not a matter of belief. Signal does not provide a way for me to download my own messages off my own devices and safely store them using my own secure backup facility.

Obviously Signal don't owe me anything. I'm not paying for the product and I appreciate what it does offer and makes available for free. But it would be much better if it also supported local backups under the user's control.

And presumably the instructions for this have been on display on our local planning department in Alpha Centauri? If a user isn't even aware that their local disk is being encrypted without their knowledge or consent then why would they think to set up recovery keys?

Signal won't let us download our own data and back it up using our own secure systems. Whatever its other merits it gets 0% for backup policy.

Though I suppose then I have to give a negative % to all the systems that have insecure online backups. This whole area is a train wreck really.

The GDS is one of the more credible parts of government IT in the UK and IME generally well respected. The government websites and online services have largely been well done. But there are limits on how much that organisation can take on with the resources it has and it's still subject to the same challenges around compensation and working environment I mentioned in another comment that make it difficult to hire and retain good people. Unfortunately it's not realistic to build all government IT projects in house that way at the moment.

Look at the salary on offer. This is for a dev/data job in Cambridge. The market rate for a senior developer here was around that level in the early 2000s. Today that would be a big pay cut for almost anyone with even the "essential" skills and experience.

The British government and public sector are constantly limiting themselves by being unwilling to pay market rates for the skills they need. Then they contract out needs like tech to work around the bureaucracy - but they demand so many strings attached that the little guys who are more cost effective don't want anything to do with it. And so they mostly outsource to large firms or sometimes specialist agencies who have jumped through the hoops to get all the right certifications. Naturally those suppliers are in a position to charge premium rates even for relatively simple work.

If the Civil Service built up a capable IT function staffed by properly qualified and experienced people that would surely save billions in budget and years in timescales for some of the (in)famous government IT projects and probably significantly increase the odds of successfully delivering something usable at the end of them. But as anyone who's working in our Civil Service can tell you the emphasis on ranks and pay scales and other very specific rules about career advancement are unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. Even if they did the culture of people moving around the Civil Service like interchangeable parts instead of building up deep expertise in specific areas would still be a problem.

With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly.

We saw a similar philosophy in TDD advocacy many years ago. Search for something like "Sudoku Jeffries" to see how that went. Then search for "Sudoku Norvig" to see what it looks like when you actually understand the problem.

The idea that you can somehow iterate your way to a solution when you have no idea where you're trying to go or even which direction your next step should be in has always seemed absurd to some of us but in the era of LLMs there's no longer any doubt. In the agentic era (can we call a few months an "era"?) I estimate that 90% or more of the writing I've read about how to use agents most effectively came down to making sure there is a clear specification for what they need to implement first and then imposing extensive guard rails to make sure their output does in fact follow that specification. It's all about doing enough design work up front to remove any ambiguity before coding the next part of the implementation and almost everyone claiming any sort of real world success with coding agents seems to have reached a similar conclusion.

Be careful about reading too much into that. Our elections yesterday were for local and sometimes regional representatives - not our central national government. The result might still prompt a change in our unpopular Prime Minister but the high vote for Reform won't necessarily translate into voting for them at the next general election. We often see protest votes for alternative parties in local politics and everyone was expecting one this time.

Surveys here have been showing a trend towards greater public support for the EU. Its advocates have been pushing for closer integration and even talking of a referendum on rejoining. Although of course this also has to be viewed cautiously because the polls before the Brexit referendum had also pointed towards remaining and one of the biggest fans of the EU recently has been that unpopular PM who might not be in office for much longer.

The EU and Europe are different. 27/50ish (depending on who you ask) countries in Europe are EU member states and they collectively have about 3/5 of the European population.

My own country - the UK - is (in)famously not a part of the EU and I don't think anyone would seriously claim that we have no technological innovation or successful tech businesses here in Cambridge. The city is practically overflowing with tech startups either spun out directly from university research or keen to employ people from the local tech community.

But what tends to happen is that when one of those companies reaches a certain stage the founders will cash out. Not everyone needs to be the next Bezos or Musk. Not everyone needs to see their company of 20 or 50 or 100 people grow to 5000 with international divisions set up before an eventual IPO. Not everyone wants to go through multiple rounds of VC funding and then have to run their company under the influence of the VC's people on the board. There are a lot of founders who would be very happy to take an eight figure payday after 10 or 20 years of working on the business and then have no need to work any longer if they don't want to and the freedom to do almost anything they want for the rest of their lives. I've personally known a few of them. Some did effectively retire. Others later started something new. But one thing I don't recall a single one of them ever expressing is regret over the timing of their exit.

If anything I'd say what is missing here is a culture where people feel the need to carry on past that stage in their startup's growth. And so instead of that successful business continuing - perhaps after some other form of exit for the founders - as a local company that might eventually become big enough to buy up other successful startups we instead see them get taken over by companies ultimately run from the USA because they're the ones with enough resources for an acquisition at that scale. Of course there have been a few that did become much bigger before an eventual exit - ARM is probably the most obvious one locally and for all the tragedies in the Autonomy story it was another - but they are the exception and not the rule here.

To come back to the car business we were originally discussing today - I doubt very much that we will build the next Tesla or BYD or even Polestar here in Cambridge - but I could easily imagine a startup here developing the next generation of car control system and then selling the IP to one of those companies as the exit strategy.